Published 5:52 pm, Wednesday, December 21, 2016

As states take steps to disenfranchise voters, the incoming president offers an attorney general hostile to voting rights.

THE STAKES:

At the root of even our most bitter political fights must be a sense of fair play.

The battle between North Carolina's Republican legislature and a new Democratic governor may seem like just a one-state partisan flap, but it speaks volumes about how far politicians are willing to go to seize and hold power. And that has national implications.

The concern goes even deeper now, with President-elect Donald Trump's anticipated nomination of an attorney general hostile to voting rights.

At stake is the health of a representative political system that functions on compromise, and presidential elections in which the will of voters is reflected — not just those in a few swing states, but in New York as well.

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In North Carolina, lawmakers moved to strip incoming Gov. Roy Cooper of some key powers, including appointment power over state and local elections boards. Whether those powers were too great is beside the point; they suited lawmakers just fine when a Republican wielded them.

That's not the only tinkering North Carolina GOP lawmakers have done. In this presidential election year, a federal court blocked the battleground state from eliminating a week of early voting; even so, many counties controlled by Republicans limited early voting hours and locations. Further, in recent years, the state has eliminated 27 polling places altogether.

North Carolina isn't alone. Across the South, at least 868 polls have been closed since the 2013 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Shelby v. Holder. The court by a 5-4 margin effectively ended the requirement that areas with a history of discriminatory voting practices get preclearance for such changes. It said Congress needs to update the formula for deciding where preclearance should be required.

Add to this the rampant gerrymandering going on nationally to create politically safe districts that all but guarantee a Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Hardly an incentive for a GOP-controlled Congress to revisit the Voting Rights Act, even with the turmoil wrought by hard-line, far right congressmen. And don't forget disenfranchisement efforts masquerading as voter ID laws.

Now comes Mr. Trump's plan to nominate for attorney general Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III — Jeff Sessions as he's known — who once called civil rights groups "un-American," a white civil rights attorney a "disgrace to his race," and the Voting Rights Act a "piece of intrusive legislation." His response to the Shelby ruling was to declare, incredibly, that Alabama "has never had a history of denying voters." So much for a Justice Department that would aggressively defend voting rights.

It's essential that incoming Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer make stopping Mr. Sessions' appointment a priority. The disenfranchisement of minority voters for political gain is a crime — there's no other word for it — that was supposed to be a thing of the past. It won't be, not if Mr. Trump is allowed to put a cop on the beat who seems ready and willing to look the other way.